Background of Study INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, the researcher provides the background of study, the statements of problems, the purposes of study, the significances of study, the scope and limitation, and the definition of key terms.

1.1 Background of Study

Translation is one of ancient disciplines that have been developing through centuries. Savory in Hartono, 2003: 2 states that the history of translation was even almost as old as the history of writing itself and it also stands on the equal level as another disciplines in literature. The first translation record that was found materialized by a Greek slave named Livius Andronicus who lived on 240 BC. He translated Odyssey into Roman poem in which his work still survives untill now due to its uniqueness. In current decade, in which cultural exchanges have been widening, knowledge has been increasingly expanding and international communication has been intensifying, the phenomenon of translation has become fundamental. Be it for scientific, medical, technological, commercial, legal, cultural or literary purposes, today human communication depends heavily on translation Manfredi, 2008: 20. Wills states that there are approximately 2 million scientists who have published their research in many disciplines of knowledge since 1945 in Hartono, 2003: 9. Unfortunately, 50 of those researches are not read by other experts and scientists due to the lack of language capability needed. The limited 2 broadening information here becomes the issue that requires consideration. The nature of knowledge is universal, means that it is owned by all individuals so that it should be shared for achieving better development in many aspects related. Hence, translation can play a significant role to overcome this issue as the bridge which connecting people within different languages and nations. In everyday life, translation is defined as an act of transforming one form of a language into another language in Larson, 1988: 3. For a better understanding of translation, let us see how Catford defined it. Catford cf. Machali, 2009: 25 defines translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language source language or SL by equivalent textual material in another language target language or TL. From the definition above, we can assume that a good translation will have equal meaning in both SL and TL. However, translating a text is not easy to be done by only using dictionaries and translating machines for a translator needs to have wide knowledge on the linguistic and cultural perspectives in order to obtain the equivalence of both source text and target text. Those aspects are quite essential for any translators to be familiar with because the meaning of the target language could be bias, taking into consideration of structure and culture of languages that are different to each other. Basically, translation meets two fundamental problems; the first one is non-linguistic which is including culture and the other one is linguistic which is including structures of the text Abdellah, 2001. These two problems occurred due to structural and cultural differences in every language, same issue also goes for English and Indonesian. We can modestly distinct them since they own uniqueness on their characteristics. Sholihah 2014 states that from the structural 3 perspective, English certainly has more complexity rather than Indonesian since it is affected by time which is known by the term “Tenses”, while Indonesian structure is not, though the time is happening in present, past or future. However, linguistic is being the primary concern here. It is becoming the most fundamental one because linguistic mastering level of a translator determines how good the translation product will be Fawcett, 1997: foreword. No matter how good a translator know the cultural differences of both SL and TL, the target text will not be good if he she does not has enough capability in linguistic. Therefore, since the translation process vitally and vividly entails language, the relevance of linguistics to translation should never be in doubt. Just like an eggshell, it wraps the whole substance of a text we translate. Thus, the fineness of a translated text will not emerge if the translator fails to construct well- structured phrases, clauses, or sentences from SL into TL. Linguistic is the scientific study of language. Troike 2006 said that linguists traditionally divide a language into different levels; lexicon vocabulary, phonology sound system, morphology word structure, syntax grammar, and discourse. In translation, linguistic problems which arise are occurring on the level of grammatical differences, lexical ambiguity, and meaning ambiguity Abdellah, 2001. It is indeed easy to translate when both languages have similarities. Nevertheless, it is difficult when both have different structure. These issues make ambiguity and inequality in translation. Hence, among those levels of linguistics, the researcher will focus on lexicon and grammar as the primary subjects of this research. Moreover, figures of speech as the stylistic problems also will be added. 4 Based on the prior analysis above, the writer believes that studying about translation and its problems are essential and beneficial. In the previous research, M. Szymczak 1970, in an international journal at university of Alberta, found that translators encounter lexical, grammatical, and stylistic problem in their work. Moreover, it was also founded that the majority of translation students faced lexical and grammatical problems in translating text cf. eg. Irhamni, 2011; Amin, 2012.Unfortunately, there were lack of research in the regards of students’ techniques and methods in translating problematical linguistic text. The writer intends to find out what methods and procedures of translation that the students use when they are encountering grammatical and lexical problems. Furthermore, the writer also adds several grammatical and lexical units as the research primary subject.

1.2 Statement of Problems